Father Carl Kabat awoke early Thursday morning, put on his clerical collar, grabbed his clown suit and quietly strolled out of his longtime friend’s Arvada home.

William Strabala, who has known the Catholic priest since their days in the seminary more than 50 years ago and had hosted him since he arrived from St. Louis, simply sighed. It was pointless, he knew, to attempt to talk the 75-year-old priest out of what he was about to do.

Shortly before 8 a.m. Thursday, Carl Kabat arrived outside a N-8 Minuteman III nuclear missile silo near New Raymer in Weld County. He donned his signature clown costume and breached the fences that surround the silo.

He hung banners on the fence. He kneeled in his yellow wig, his one-piece blue jumper adorned with patches and smiley faces and his outsized red shoes. And he prayed.

Military authorities quickly arrived.

Carl Kabat, who has spend most of the past two decades in federal prison for more than a dozen similar anti-nuclear-weapon protests, was led once again to jail, facing charges of criminal mischief and second- degree criminal trespass.

“What is the date today?” Bill Strabala asked when I contacted him. “It is the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a priest, the 64th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Japan.”

Carl Kabat, he said, loves such symmetry.

Before leaving, the priest placed on the table a typewritten message he wanted his friend to distribute.

“We are Fools and Clowns for the Holy One and Humanity’s Sake,” he headlined it. It is a reference to a favorite saying of his, one he told me years ago over dinner only days after he’d been released from a long stretch in prison.

“St. Paul says we are fools for God’s sake. I change it to say we are fools and clowns for God and humanity’s sake,” he said, explaining the clown get-up.

“I, Father Carl Kabat, come to this evil place today as a Roman Catholic priest of 50 years, to show what insanity is in the ground here and at other silos in our beautiful country,” his statement began.

“President Barack Obama has stated, ‘As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act . . .'”

With his arrest on Thursday, Carl Kabat wrote that he was just “doing my little bit in (the president’s) effort.”

It wasn’t clear at this writing whether the priest did what he normally does during such protests, which includes dropping his own blood from a vial he carries with him, pounding the silo lid with a hammer and writing an anti-nuclear message on the lid with black spray paint.

Over dinner on that long-ago winter night, he explained the blood as shedding his own so others might live. The first time he went to jail, during the Jimmy Carter years, he had poured blood on a pillar of the White House.

The hammer, he explained, was a reference to the prophet Isaiah, who wrote: “They shall beat their spears into pruning hooks and their swords into plowshares.”

Carl Kabat is a gentle soul, a man who must look at you crooked because one eye barely works now. When he is not doing time — a bunch of it, he says, was spent “in the hole” — he devotes his life to ministering to the poor.

I never will forget his response when I asked him why he does such things, always landing himself in prison.

“Someone has to do this,” he said with a laugh, adding that the missiles he attacks are 20 times more powerful than the one that wiped out 100,000 people in Hiroshima.

“Just one of those missiles could kill 2 million human beings. I have to do this.”

William Strabala, 72, late Thursday was trying to figure out how to post his friend’s $2,000 bail.

“I told him goodbye last night,” he said. “I just shook my head at him, and told him I am too old to go on this journey with him. Foolish or not, Father Carl has guts.”

Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.

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